Before – and since – the founding of the DataPortability Project at the end of 2007 “data portability” has been a hot topic.

The DataPortability Project describes their philosophy:

“As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors.”

The staggering list of social aggregator sites and personal content storage options on the Web today provides us all with unprecedented choice in how and where we store our ‘stuff’ and how we share it.

Too often, in order to choose the best options, we end up loading the same videos and photos onto multiple sites. Wouldn’t it be better to add that content to one site and then move, copy, import or access our photos and videos without multiple uploads?

As companies have trended toward being more open and transparent over the past few years, it’s refreshing to see the next logical steps toward transparency: between companies – or at least between their applications.

Last year we saw FaceBook provide a way for anyone to build an application on its platform with very little restriction (yes, the ZoomIn Facebook app is in the works.).

Google responded with OpenSocial, a ‘standardized’ API for sharing data between social applications and sites.

We believe ZoomIn is working to support data portability:

• You can import your photos from Flickr and Picasa thanks to their APIs and our easy-to-use interface.
  
• We also provide the means, through the same easy-to-use interface, to send photos back to Flickr and Picasa.
  
• You can import your e-mail address book from popular services like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.
  
• You can also export your entire address book as a CSV file.
  
• We will always allow you to download your original photos, either individually or as an album to your PC or Mac. They don’t expire or disappear.
  
• We allow you to share your photos through e-mail, by posting links to your albums, or by embedding slideshows in any site that supports embedding.
  
• We believe that they’re your photos; you’ll always have access to them. We just hope you take advantage of ZoomIn’s top-quality prints along the way.
  
• We’re actively exploring using OpenId as a way for you to bring your existing userid credentials along with you to use on ZoomIn.
  

If you think there are ways that ZoomIn can provide more portability for you, we want to hear it. Are there other sites you want us to work with? Other ways you want to share your photos? Let us know here.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 6:15 am and is filed under Zoom.IN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.